God Goes Abroad.

So, first a bit of back tracking on my summer adventures. Before I jetted off to Russia, I got to be a Co-Site Leader for an Alternative Breaks trip to Catalina Island, California to help out with the Catalina Environmental Leadership Program (CELP, www.celp.net ). In short, the program was wonderful and I learned so many wonderful things that I want to apply to my life back home. I also got to check off a lot of great experiences from my “Must-Do” checklist. I think my favorite thing that we did was the mountain climb because the view was absolutely breath-taking and I had a great time hiking it with Megan, one of the participants. I included a few pictures below, which are slightly grainy because my camera decided that it did not want to photograph any bit of my time on Catalina, but thank god for the invention of Camera Phones!

Before heading off to Catalina, we had time to stop into this restaurant for a quick bite. I got a bacon cheddar cheese waffle and every bite was completely wonderful! Not the best idea to eat such rich food before an hour boat ride on the Pacific, but still worth every bit of my suffering.

CELP is essentially a summer-camp with an emphasis on Environmental Education, so we got to stay in little cabins that were named after types of ships, ours was “Submarine.”

This is a view from the lovely hike I mentioned previously.

Now, to refocus on the main topic at hand of my time abroad. I am happy to say that I have managed to survive four days of schooling in the post-soviet educational system! The teachers are energetic, much better than I expected, and, surprisingly, very funny. Thus far, I think my group and I favor our phonetics teacher, Masha. She is hilarious and I have no clue how she managed to pull off one and a half hours of intermingling education and fun, but I hope she can keep it up.

Things in my non-scholastic life seem to becoming along as well. I have finally been able to lay out some semi-concrete plans as to what I want to do with my time here and I am VERY excited about it. The group and I are actually planning to see Peterhof tomorrow and I am on edge with pure elation. The fact that I am going to see one of my favorite buildings in the whole world, the building that is part one of my “WHY I want to be an architect” trifecta, blows my mind to such great extents that I actually cannot comprehend the world. I mean, if this is a dream, I hope that I do not wake up until I have toured all the grounds and have seen everything there is to see, touch, smell, or just be in complete awe about. Yeah, I am just a little bit excited.

I will admit that I am very happy to have tomorrow’s plans as my highlight for the week because it has definitely been an emotional roller coaster. Between beginning instruction about Russian entirely in Russian, my banks incompetence, and my perpetual celebrity status as the “dark-skinned one,” I have certainly longed for that plane ride home to arrive in much less than six weeks. It is obviously very jolting to be immersed in living situations that are contrary to your own, but traveling to Russia for one’s first time abroad is certainly much more different than hitting up the typical travel locations one finds in Western Europe. It is everything I knew about Russia, but had hoped not to discover as true. I mean, quite honestly, it is a somewhat depressing place to be given my actual living situation.

Now, to end on a much more interesting note; for those curious to see a few bits and pieces of St. Petersburg, I included some images and captions below.

Of course, the Winter Palace/Hermitage!

Me touching it for the very first time JUST to make sure it is real.

The streets of St. Petersburg!! This is leaving the Palace Square. I apologize as I do not know how to rotate it, but you can just turn your head if you are interested enough.